This article is more than 1 year old

Yahoo! to juice Facebook fusion

Deeper integration with Facebook Connect

Yahoo! will begin sucking down more Facebook user data across its stable of websites in a bid to keep overlapping audiences clicking on its pages longer.

The search firm said that sometime in the first half of 2010, it will begin "deeply" integrating with the Facebook Connect service across Yahoo! websites such as Mail, News, Finance, and Sports.

Yahoo! already has some hooks into Facebook's social network, such as letting users post Facebook status updates and preview messages from Facebook friends via the Yahoo! homepage.

The company said future integration will let social-networking sorts shuttle more content between most Yahoo! websites and Facebook, such as sharing photos from Flickr or comments on news stories.

"As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!'s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most," wrote Jim Stoneham, veep of Yahoo! communities in a Wednesday blog post.

But more importantly to Yahoo!, it keeps traffic from straying when users when feel an urge to navel gaze on a social network.

Facebook Connect, introduced last year, is a set of APIs that let third-party websites use Facebook credentials outside the social networker's web domain. The service has been adopted by other major online traffickers such as YouTube, Yelp, and Xbox Live. ®

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